I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Randy Ambrosie wants to talk. That’s a good thing. I think.

Specifically, the Canadian Football League commissioner would welcome a fireside chat about division alignment and playoff structure, both of which are becoming hot-button issues due to a West-East competitive imbalance that borders on the sadistic.

“I’m happy to have that conversation with everyone and I think we should have it,” the commish told Ted Wyman of the Winnipeg Sun.

For those of you keeping score at home, West has met East 20 times during the current crusade. The tally is 17-2-1 in favor of the five outfits left of the Manitoba-Ontario boundary. One game finished 60-1.

That is not a typo. Do not adjust your monitors. It really was 60-1.

Seriously. This is death by wedgie.

Actually, West Division clubs aren’t simply giving their nerdy eastern foes a basic wedgie. They’re the high school senior pulling the freshman’s underpants up to his ears, sticking his head in a toilet bowl, flushing, then stuffing him into a locker. Oh, but first he steals his lunch money.

And yet, under the current structure, two of the eastern rag dolls will qualify for the playoffs in November. And be rewarded with home dates. Nice gig if you can get it.

Little wonder that Ambrosie says he’s “willing to have the conversation for sure.”

Wyman and others suggest the CFL scrap its antiquated West-East divisional arrangement. Lump all nine teams together, with the top six advancing to the Grey Cup tournament. Radical, yes. After all, geographic rivalry has been the heartbeat of the CFL since its inception, and getting some people to abandon tradition is like trying to pry Donald Trump’s thumbs off his Twitter account. You’ll need the jaws of life, baby.

I don’t think you have to sacrifice tradition, though. Just tweak the schedule. Reduce it to 16 games (18 is two too many) and either eliminate, or reduce by half, interlocking play. You know, just like in the good, ol’ days when West and East were separate entities. In other words, go back to the future.

Works for me. So, gentlemen, start your chins wagging.

I wondered when one of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers would play the Rodney Dangerfield no-respect card, and running back Andrew Harris delivered not long after he and his blue-and-gold clad pals had paddywhacked the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, 39-12, on Saturday at Timbits Field in Hamilton. “I always think someone is out there slouching us and not giving us any respect.” Here’s the deal, Andrew: Beat someone other than one of the lame and halting outfits from the east and more people will climb on board.

Chad Owens and CFL commish Randy Ambrosie

The CFL broke out its Diversity is Strength T-shirts last weekend, and it occurs to me that it’s more than just a fresh marketing slogan. Among other things, the CFL has included a female general manager, Jo-Anne Polak with the Ottawa Rough Riders; another female, Catherine Raiche, is an assistant GM with the Montreal Alouettes; the Larks once had an openly gay man, Michael Sam, in their lineup; Ambrosie’s predecessor in the commish’s office, Jeffrey Orridge, is African-American; and a black man, Bernie Custis, was playing quarterback for Hamilton as far back as 1951. That’s diversity.

Donnovan Bennett of Sportsnet writes this: “The MOP at the halfway point of the season is a kicker.” Say again? A punter/place kicker, Justin Medlock of the Bombers, is the most oustanding player in the CFL? Spare us the nonsense, Donnovan. Everyone knows that kickers aren’t football players (sorry Bob Cameron and Troy Westwood). Once upon a time kickers were, indeed, football players (hello Kid Dynamite James, Choo Choo Shepard, Spaghetti Legs Parker, Jack Abendschan, Don Jonas, etc.), but now they boot the football and go for a Slurpee. Your MOP right now is Mike Reilly.

Terrific read from Ed Tait on Winnipeg O-lineman Jermarcus (Yoshi) Hardrick, who look a long, hard road to the CFL. Tait’s piece is the type of feature you seldom read in either of River City’s two dailies, due largely to space and access restrictions, and it’s a reminder of what the Winnipeg Free Press sports pages lost when he defected to bluebombers.com. Anyone at the Drab Slab who thinks Tait is a hack (hello, Paul Wiecek) has totally lost the plot.

Let’s see now, umpire Joe West provides a harmless, fun anecdote about Adrian Beltre and he’s suspended for three days. So what will Major League Baseball do with Detroit Tigers second sacker Ian Kinsler? He dumped all over ump Angel Hernandez, telling the Detroit Free Press, “He needs to find another job, he really does. He’s messing with baseball games, blatantly. I’m just saying it’s pretty obvious that he has to stop ruining baseball games. Candidly, leave the game. No one wants you behind the plate anymore.” I’m guessing MLB will be making an ATM withdrawal from Kinsler’s account, at the least.

Nice to see Erik Gudbranson, Troy Stecher and Jake Virtanen of the Canucks get into the spirit at Vancouver’s Pride parade and hijinks. It takes some special kind of gonads for macho hockey players to put on a rainbow-colored skirt and lei.

Bravo to Phil Kessel. The Pittsburgh Penguins forward has posted a pic of himself and the Stanley Cup stuffed with BBQ’d hot dogs, in what was a direct shot at Postmedia columnist Steve Simmons, who’d written a blistering piece about Kessel after he’d been dealt away by the Toronto Maple Leafs two years ago. Among other things, Simmons called Kessel “poison” and he claimed that the winger pigged out daily at a certain downtown hot dog stand in the Republic of Tranna (proven to be false). So what did Simmons think of the Kessel burn? “One, I thought ‘Phil’s pretty funny. Good for Phil for making a joke about it.’” he said on TSN 1050’s Breakfast Club. “Two, ‘This is your day with the Cup. This is your day…you’ve worked this hard, you get this thing, you’re having a party, why be so small to reference something that really isn’t important in your life?’” Yo! Steve! “Small” is writing about a guy’s rumored eating habits and getting the rumored facts wrong. What Kessel did to you, meanwhile, is a classic burn. Try lightening up.

Which brings me to today’s list: Biggest hot dogs in sports…

1. Muhammad Ali: The former heavyweight boxing champion was many things, but he most definitely was a hot dog (in a fun way).2. Reggie Jackson: Mr. October was also Mr. Swagger.3. Terrell Owens: Popcorn anyone?4. Deion Sanders: He once said, “They don’t pay nobody to be humble.” He’s living proof.5. Johnny Manziel: There isn’t enough mustard in the world to cover this do-nothing hot dog.

Further evidence of the Torontofication of the Winnipeg Sunsports section: In Steve Simmons’ past two odds-and-ends, three-dot columns that appear weekly, he devoted 21 items to sports franchises or figures in the Republic of Tranna. That’s compared to zero (0) Winnipeg references. To repeat: Toronto 21, Winnipeg 0. So, again, I ask why is a Toronto-centric column appearing weekly in a River City sheet? Aren’t any of the local writers capable of stringing together a series of wide-ranging quotes, notes and anecdotes that include opinion snippets about Winnipeg’s sports scene? I mean, if I can do it from Victoria, surely someone with their feet on the ground in good Ol’ Hometown can do it.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been scribbling mostly about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she’s old and probably should think about getting a life.

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

I’m not sure if we should be grateful to Andrew Barroway or give him a swift boot in the butt.

Arizona Coyotes captain Shane Doan

I mean, he didn’t simply do the dirty to Shane Doan when he kicked the Arizona Coyotes captain to the curb the other day. He also deep-sixed Winnipeg Jets 1.0. Officially.

Oh, I suppose one of the other 30 National Hockey League outfits might want to take a flyer on a 41-year-old forward with hard miles on him come October, so there’s a possibility, however remote, that the one remaining remnant of a franchise that forsook a city in 1996 will skate another day. That wouldn’t disturb the reality that Winnipeg-Phoenix is no more, though.

Doan was the last link, you see. The final warm body to have worn both Jets 1.0 and Coyotes linen.

The man that Yotes owner Barroway discarded like an old pair of tattered socks was still a freshly scrubbed teenager when he arrived in River City for a tour of duty that took him from the frozen flatlands of the True North to the sun-baked Arizona desert, covering 22 years, 20 full NHL seasons, one lockout-shortened season, one completely aborted season, two countries, four Canadian prime ministers, four American presidents, one failed franchise, one bankrupt franchise, 1,540 games and zero Stanley Cup parades.

I suppose that last item on the inventory will always be the rub for Doan. No titles.

He had no chance, though. Not in Winnipeg, where he surfaced just in time to watch the moving vans roll up to the doors, and not in Phoenix, where the moving vans were usually parked—with the engines running—right next to the Zamboni. Winnipeg-Phoenix is, in fact, the only surviving member of the World Hockey Association to never capture hockey’s holy grail.

Now, with the Coyotes’ outright release of Doan, that connection is no more. The Yotes have rid themselves of the last of our guys. And suddenly I’m feeling an urge to give someone a high five.

Winnipeg Jets rookie Shane Doan

I don’t know about you, but I never bought into the bunk about Doan dissing Winnipeg when whispers arose that the Phoenix franchise would be re-relocating to its original home in 2011. He simply stated a reluctance to uproot his bride, Andrea, and their four children. He didn’t want to move anywhere. Repeat: Anywhere. “I never once said a single disparaging word about Winnipeg,” Doan told The Hockey News. “I simply stated that the connection that I had with Phoenix was because I’d been there for 15 years, the same thing as I would have if I’d been in Winnipeg for 15 years and someone told me I had to leave.” That didn’t stop fans and select members of mainstream media from dumping on Doan. Most notable was a juvenile and amateurish rant by Gary Lawless, then a columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press.

I thought Jets bankroll, Puck Pontiff Mark Chipman, was the only NHL owner who likes to play general manager, poking his nose into the general manager’s business as part of his daily routine. Turns out Barroway is a big buttinski, too. At least that’s the way Doan tells the story of his ouster. “Ya,” he told the Burns and Gambo Show on Arizona Sports 98.7, “it was the owner’s decision. When he got possession of the team…he chose that he wanted to go with the younger group and that me being around might’ve kind of delayed things. Sometimes you’ve got to rip the band-aid off.” Doan’s right. He got ripped off.

Here’s a discomforting thought if you’re a member of Jets Nation: Before they actually play a game in the NHL, the Vegas Golden Knights will have better goaltending that the Jets.

I note that NASA squinters have discovered 10 planets that could potentially support life. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman immediately announced that one of those 10 planets would get an expansion franchise before Quebec City.

Good piece on Nolan Patrick and family by Ted Wyman in the Winnipeg Sun. What a score it would be if Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff did some fancy footwork and moved up in the queue to claim the local lad at the NHL entry draft on Friday. Alas, the Puck Pontiff doesn’t allow Chevy to think outside the box.

Brooke Henderson

Just a thought: If a Canadian male teenager had won four Professional Golf Association tournaments—including a major—in the past two years, he’d be hailed as the second coming of Arnold Palmer. Or at least George Knudson. But when Brooke Henderson wins her fourth event—including a major—in two years on the Ladies PGA Tour, it’s a sidebar at best. Brooke wasn’t near the top of any sports page I saw after she’d won the Meijer LPGA Classic on Sunday, and the adolescents dressed as men on TSN The Reporters gave a token, less-than-two-minutes mention to the Smiths Falls, Ont., teenager before launching into a chin-wag that somehow found its way to frat-boy banter about U.S. Open champion Brooks Koepka’s girlfriend, whom Michael Farber compared to a putter before advising Steve Simmons that “you can’t kiss that girl.” I’m speechless.

Update on Claire Eccles, the only female in the West Coast League: The Victoria HarbourCats lefthander from Surrey, B.C., won her first start on Sunday, beating the Kitsap BlueJackets 7-2 at Royal Athletic Park. After two appearances in the summer baseball league comprised mostly of NCAA Division I players, this is her pitching line:

2IP 1H 2R 2ER 1BB 1HBP 0K 9.00ERA (relief)

3IP 3H 2R 2ER 3BB 0HBP 1K 6.00 ERA (starter)

Patti Dawn Swansson has been scribbling about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she’s old and probably should think about getting a life.

Through the magic that is Skype, I have been to the Rocky Mountain back woods, where the reclusive and mysterious Madame Redneck resides in a shanty with a dozen feral cats and a seemingly never-ending supply of Kokanee.

I have witnessed her gaze into her crystal ball, read her Tarot cards and use her bony, nicotine-stained fingers to sift through the tea leaves.

This is what the mysterious Madame says will unfold in the toy department in 2017…

* The Puck Pontiff, Mark Chipman, will also become the Pigskin Pontiff when True North Sports & Entertainment assumes control of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Asked how much he paid for the Canadian Football League club, Chipman says, “Pay? Pay? Are you kidding me? Pay? Have you not been paying attention? They haven’t won the Grey Cup since kindly Cal Murphy still had his first heart. Bless his soul.”

* Chipman’s first order of business as a Two-Sport Pontiff will be to dismiss CEO Wade Miller, GM Kyle Walters and head coach Mike O’Shea and replace them with Craig Heisinger, because he replaces everyone with Zinger.

“It’s been an unbelievable ride,” Zinger gushes after accepting his new position(s). “Not many people can say they washed Teemu Selanne’s jock and now Justin Medlock’s jock. I’ve been blessed.”

* There will be a playoff game at Football Follies Field in Fort Garry after the Bombers finish second in the West Division. Alas, the 8,298 frigid folks in attendance will leave disappointed when Medlock, who Zinger trades to the B.C. Lions, kicks a 61-yard field goal on the final play of the game to give the Leos a 34-32 victory.

“Aha! All the smart asses in the media said it couldn’t be done,” Mike O’Shea barks from his perch as analyst on the CFL on TSN panel. “Just goes to show all those smart asses in the media that I was right last year! It can be done!”

Johnny Football

* Because his predecessor, Walters, left him without a quarterback under contract, Heisinger will sign National Football League washout and all-around bad boy Johnny Manziel to a five-year contract. Asked by news snoops if there is concern about Manziel’s sordid past, Heisinger is quick to prop up his new QB.

“We don’t think Johnny Football is a risk at all,” Zinger assures one and all. “Johnny Football comes to us a humble, rehabilitated man. Johnny Football could have demanded the moon from us, but Johnny Football didn’t ask us to show him the money. All he asked for is a chance and a six-pack of Labatt’s Blue as a signing bonus. Off the record, we were willing to go as high as a two-four of Blue to sign Johnny Football. Just don’t tell him.”

* The Winnipeg Jets will not qualify for the Stanley Cup tournament and, when asked to provide an overview of his club’s season, head coach Paul Maurice doesn’t mince words.

“What did you expect to happen?” he mutters. “Our young men just played 82 games in less than six months. That’s a lot to ask of these young men. There’s only so much you can ask of these young men.”

Reminded that the other 29 outfits in the National Hockey League also played an 82-game schedule in six months and 16 of them will carry on to participate in as many as 28 more playoff skirmishes, Maurice snaps.

“I don’t appreciate you questioning our young men,” he bleats. “I can make you f%*&ing cry.”

“Clearly, this was the result of an eastern bloc bias,” Chevy says. “Does this mean the Toronto Maple Leafs are using a better draft-and-develop model than us? I don’t think so. Does this mean the Toronto Maple Leafs have a better process than us? Again, I don’t think so. Does this mean Auston Matthews is a better player than Patrik? I don’t think so, but I suppose that’s for others to argue. Sometimes these things happen and, with Patrik, it happened. We didn’t want it to happen, but I recall reading somewhere that Bobby Hull never won the rookie award, either. So it happened to Bobby as well. We like where Patrik is and where he’s going, just like we like where all our young players are and where they’re going. Sometimes there will be hiccups, but I don’t look at this as a hiccup. I look at it as confirmation that our process is working and that the playoffs are right around the corner. How far away that corner is, I can’t tell you. But, as I’ve been telling you for six years now, I know there’s a corner out there somewhere and we’ll turn it one day, hopefully with Patrik and all our young players showing us the way to that corner.”

The Two-Sport Pontiff, meanwhile, echoes his GM’s comments and adds, “I’m just glad we don’t have to pay Patrik the rookie bonus. That doesn’t mean we operate on the chintz. It just means that I can tell Chevy to spend that money more wisely. Like by re-signing Chris Thorburn.”

* Someone at Postmedia will finally notice that there are only three people left to buy out or force out of the Winnipeg Sun toy department, so it will attempt to hire freelancers to put some flesh on the tabloid’s bones and combat the nine bylines that appear regularly in the Winnipeg Free Press sports pages.

“It’s either that or shutter all the doors and windows,” a Postmedia mouthpiece says. “Now that Kirk Penton is gone, I don’t know how Paul Friesen, Ted Wyman and Ken Wiebe can compete with the Drab Slab if we don’t give them some help. Know anyone who’ll write for free?”

Recognizing that the Sun is ripe for the picking, True North Sports & Entertainment will swoop in with an offer Postmedia can’t refuse. Postmedia agrees to let TNSE take the tabloid off its hands for $1 plus applicable tax.

“Can you believe it? It cost us more to buy this two-bit rag than the Bombers,” says Puck, Pigskin & Paper Pontiff Mark Chipman, who now owns everything in River City except the Winnipeg Goldeyes and the Disraeli Bridge, “but I think it’ll be worth all 100 pennies once we brainwash the appropriate people and show them how to do things the True North way. Friesen, Wyman and Wiebe can all keep their jobs, but they’ll be house organs who write nothing but puff pieces.”

Asked what will happen if they refuse, the Triple P Pontiff says, “I’ll get Paul Maurice to make them f%*&ing cry.”

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit. She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Evander Kane fought the law and won.

Okay, what’s the over/under on Evander Kane? One month? Two months? Or can he go the distance and keep his nose clean for the next six months, thus escaping the long arm of the law?

I you missed it, old friend Evander fought the law and won this week in upstate New York, where it seems that men physically assailing women—i.e. grabbing a fistful of their hair, grabbing them by the throat, grabbing them by the wrist—is such a common occurrence on the Buffalo bar scene that prosecutors react with all the scorn of a parent scolding a child for failing to wash behind his ears.

“This type of activity in bars occurs every weekend,” Erie county District Attorney Michael Flaherty said quite ho-humishly when explaining how it was that Kane walked on charges of misdemeanor trespass and non-criminal violations of harassment and disorderly conduct on Monday.

It didn’t matter that surveillance evidence from the Bottoms Up bar security cameras showed images of Kane “in contact with other patrons, grabbing a girl by her hair, grabbing another girl by her wrist and then scuffling with some bouncers as they try to escort him.” According to Flaherty (he apparently overlooked or ignored the part of the security film that showed Kane wrapping his hands around a woman’s throat), this behaviour “could be described as arrogant, surly and boorish, but at the end of the day what he did did not rise to the level of criminal offence.”

(Yes, I suppose that begs this question: What the hell does pass for a criminal offence in Buffalo?)

Whatever, Kane, the former oft-injured, underachieving, controversial Winnipeg Jets winger and now an oft-injured, underachieving, controversial Buffalo Sabres winger, received a get-out-of-jail-free card. There was, mind you, a caveat: He must straighten up and fly right between now and March 30, otherwise some big-bellied sheriff will stir from his boys-will-be-boys posture and revisit Kane’s improprieties on that late June night at Bottoms Up.

Assuming Kane keeps his hands to himself and eats all his vegetables for the next six months, Lady Justice will turn a blind eye to his misdeeds and pretend they never happened. You know, sort of like what the National Hockey League is already doing.

Well, good luck with that.

I mean, keeping one’s name off a police blotter for half a year wouldn’t be a burden for 99.99999 per cent of 25-year-old men in North America, but we’re talking Evander Kane here. Party boy. Loads of loot. Doesn’t much give a damn what you or I or someone wearing a tin badge think or say about him. If he wants to jaywalk, he’ll jaywalk. If he wants to spit on a city sidewalk, he’ll unload a loogie. And if he wants to grab a woman’s hair in a bar, he’ll have a mitt full of splint ends.

But, hey, he promises to eat all his veggies for the next six months, which apparently is good enough for the Buffalo legal system, the Sabres and the NHL.

Alexander Burmistrov, aka Paul Maurice’s adopted son.

I have a few questions for Jets head coach Paul Maurice: It’s about Alexander Burmistrov…why, Paul? Why? Did you pull a Madonna and legally adopt the wandering waif when you were coaching in Russia? I mean, this isn’t Little House on the Prairie, where Ma and Pa Ingalls continually brought strays and orphans home to their wee shack on the flatland. The guy’s a bust. Let’s move on.

Speaking of coach Pa Ingalls, he delivered a rather harsh indictment of the linesman who ticketed the Jets for a too-many-men violation in the bonus period of their 4-3 overtime loss to Team Ovechkin in Washington on Thursday night. “Horse shit,” is how Maurice described the call. Well, I’ll see his “horse shit” and raise him a “horse’s ass” for his interpretation of the play and rule. Captain Blake Wheeler was in a different time zone when his replacement, Patrik Laine, hopped over the boards as the Capitals dashed forward on a two-on-one. Forty feet from the players’ bench is a penalty. At any time.

Dumbest headline of the week was delivered by the Winnipeg Sun after the local hockey heroes’ defeat in Donald Trump’s kind of town: “Jets winners even in loss.” The accompanying article by Ted Wyman was just as lame. I swear, there was more sugar coating on his game story than on a dozen glazed Timbits. I got a toothache just reading the thing. Spare us the pom-pom waving, boys. Moral victories are for the forlorn and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Coach Paul Maurice: Is this the look that intimidates the Winnipeg media?

Here’s more on Maurice. Interesting chin-wag between the two Grumpets in the Winnipeg Free Press toy department, sports editor Steve Lyons and columnist Paul Wiecek, who discuss the likelihood that news snoops in River City walk on egg shells around the Jets bench boss. I cannot imagine that coach Pa Ingalls is a more intimidating man than John Bowie Ferguson back in the day. Seldom did we see Fergy when there wasn’t smoke seeping from his mouth, nose and ears. And that was before he lit his cigar. I don’t recall news scavengers running scared, though. Yo! Journos! Any man who harbors hope for Alexander Burmistrov and his rudderless game is never the smartest man in the room. Next time Maurice goes into intimidation mode, remind him of his NHL coaching record: 18 seasons, 11 seasons out of playoffs, two times fired mid-season, won-lost percentage .500, give or take a shootout.

I note that the Freep Grumpets allowed the induction of Doug Brown to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Roll of Honour to pass without mention. I find that interesting because Lyons and Wiecek pooh-poohed a similar salute to quarterbacking legend Dieter Brock. “He never won anything,” is what Lyons said of Diet the Treat, twice anointed the Most Outstanding Player in the Canadian Football League. Well, okay, Brock failed to bring the Grey Cup to River City. And D-lineman Brown did it how many times? Once? Twice. Thrice? Nope. Try zero. Zilch. Zip. He never won anything. But hey. Brown delivers once-a-week alphabet soup to the Freep sports pages, and we can’t have the Grumpets eating their own, now can we.

I don’t want to be accused of ageism, but it’s about the B.C. Lions. Seriously? Paul McCallum? If you missed it, the Leos have hauled McCallum out of moth balls and he’ll be doing the short-range place-kicking in the Leos’ final regular-season game and the CFL playoffs. My initial thought: Can Joe Kapp be far behind? Upon further review, however, McCallum’s 46-year-old right leg can’t be any worse than Richie Leone’s 24-year-old right limb. Leone has been about as dependable as a leaky condom. He’s had more misses than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. So, based on coach/GM Wally Buono’s track record, this will probably work.

Legendary Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray.

My takes on the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series:1) Finally, Steve Bartman can leave his house; 2) Love the Budweiser commercial featuring a Harry Caray voiceover, it’s pure genius; 3) Game 7 of the Cubs-Cleveland Indians series was the reason I love baseball more than any other sport.

Steve Simmons, whose work often appears in the Winnipeg Sun, has been voted favorite sports writer by readers of the Toronto Sun. He calls it “humbling.” Not so humbling, apparently, that he couldn’t resist the urge to advise his Twitter followers that “it’s 21 times now” that he’s felt so humbled.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 46 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Today, kids, we’re going to do some math. Simple math.

You will learn that the number zero really is the number zero, except in the minds of sports scribes who would have us believe that the number zero is actually of greater value than the number 47.

Let’s begin…

Since the inception of the crossover playoff rule in the Canadian Football League, eight West Division teams have traveled that route in an effort to advance to the Grey Cup game. Each of those outfits arrived at a dead end. Two of the eight managed to survive the East Division semifinal, but both crashed and burned in the final. Thus, crossover sides are 0-for-8. They are 0-for-life.

A couple of Winnipeg scribes believe the Blue Bombers and quarterback Matt Nichols would be better off finishing fourth.

Yet here we have two news snoops, Paul Wiecek and Ted Wyman, promoting the notion that the current edition of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers would better serve itself by securing a crossover post-season berth, rather than attempt to navigate its way through the rugged West terrain.

“If the 8-6 Bombers do slip to fourth place in the West,” Wyman writes in the Winnipeg Sun, “they still have the inside track on a crossover playoff spot and that would actually make their post-season road easier.”

“The team that finishes fourth in the West Division this year will have a lot better chance of playing in the Grey Cup than the team that finishes third, or maybe even second, in the West,” Wiecek writes in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Really? Well, let’s do the math.

The crossover rule as we know it began in 1997. As mentioned, eight West Division outfits have been down that path. They are 0-for-8. That’s a success rate of 0 (zero) per cent. In that same time frame, nine second- or third-place clubs in the West have either played in, or won, the Grey Cup game. That’s a success rate of 47.3 per cent.

I’m uncertain where Wyman attended school, but I know Wiecek is a product of St. Paul’s High and I doubt the Jesuits taught him that a 0 (zero) per cent success rate is superior to 47.3 per cent.

The numbers don’t lie. They tell us it’s actually more difficult for a crossover West Division team to do its grunt work on the eastern side of the Manitoba-Ontario border. The moral of the story: The Bombers should be shooting for second place, not fourth.

But, hey, why would writers want to let facts get in the way of a flimsy premise?

For the record…

Just wondering: Given that Jacob Trouba is refusing to report for Winnipeg Jets training exercises, do we now describe him as a stay-at-home defenceman? It certainly gives literal meaning to the term.

There must be something foul in the drinking water at the Winnipeg Sun. I mean, Ted Wyman didn’t stop at telling us that the Bombers are better off heading east even though history confirms that it’s a fool’s play, he also goes to great lengths to tell us why the Jets absolutely cannot, at any cost, trade Jacob Trouba. Apparently, it would set some sort of nasty, dangerous precedent. Before signing off, however, Wyman submits that the National Hockey League club “shouldn’t trade him now. A least, until it’s on their own terms.” I see. You can’t trade him but you can trade him.

The loss of football scribe Ed Tait to the Bombers website was a large blow to the Freep toy department, but the work of young Jeff Hamilton has cushioned the blow considerably. He’s good. The loss of Gary Lawless to TSN might have been impactful if not for his replacement in the main columnist’s chair, Paul Wiecek, who is no less opinionated and a vastly superior writer. Many readers don’t embrace Wiecek’s sometimes grating style, but that’s only because they prefer that he wave pom-poms. Sports editor Steve Lyons, meanwhile, has also added cops-and-robbers guy Mike McIntyre, Jason Bell and Mike Sawatzky to his stable of scribes at the Drab Slab to more than offset the departure of veteran Tim Campbell, a solid reporter but a bland wordsmith.

I keep hoping for some fresh faces and voices to deliver some oomph to the tabloid in town. Ted Wyman, Kirk Penton, Ken Wiebe and Paul Friesen fight the good fight for the Sun, but the cast of thousands from hither and yawn in the sprawling Postmedia empire leaves me cold. It would help if Friesen’s column appeared more than twice a month. Opinion is supposed to be a major part of the Sun’s personality. So let’s have it. Get Friesen back up and running on a regular rotation, and get another local voice willing to rattle some cages.

Read a piece by Damien Cox in the Toronto Star the other day. The article was a yawner, but he made at least one interesting point: “As both the original Jets and Jets 2.0, they’ve never really had a hometown star.” At first blush, I thought, “That can’t be true.” Then I did a roll call. Ted Green, Joe Daley, Ab McDonald, Perry Miller, Bob Woytowich, Jordy Douglas, Randy Gilhen…closest to a homebrew star would have been the Seed, Teddy Green, even thought he was at the tail end of his career when he arrived to help the Jets win two World Hockey Association titles.

I note that the Edmonton Oilers have a furball mascot named Hunter, a Canadian lynx. The Oilers tell us that Hunter is the first mascot in team history. And here I thought that Dave Semenko was their first mascot.

You cannot doll up the World Cup of Hockey. You can tweak it all you like for 2020, but it is what it is. And here’s what it is: They’re playing for bragging rights. Whoop-dee-do. Whereas the intrigue of the political arena (read: Cold War) spilled over into the hockey arena in best-on-best tournaments during the 1970s and 1980s, no such climate exists today. Intrigue fueled the passion. Now, we can’t even marshal up a genuine hate-on for the Americans, not even when Torts is going off his nut. We just feel sorry for the people who have to play for him.

Well, Steve Simmons is doing his Dear Ann and Dear Abby thing again. In August, you might recall, the Postmedia columnist was telling golfer Brooke Henderson she needed to “grow up” because she skipped out on an interview or two. Now, it’s Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman who “seems like an annoying kid who needs to grow up just a little.” Henderson is 19. Stroman is 25. We all had growing up to do at that age. Simmons has become that cranky, old neighbor who kicks the kids off his front lawn when they climb the fence to retrieve their baseball. Leave the young’uns alone, Grandpa Steve. The kids are alright.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 46 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Benny Hatskin got it all started at Portage and Main in June 1972.

Quiz me this, kids: What does Mark Chipman have against Ben Hatskin?

I mean, okay, the notion of bridging the Winnipeg Jets’ present to the past in the form of a Hall of Fame is an admirable enterprise. And few of a certain vintage will quibble with the inaugural inductees—Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson and Bobby Hull. The Hot Line, after all, delivered two World Hockey Association titles to River City and, if we are to believe Glen Sather, it served as a blueprint for the run-and-gun Edmonton Oilers who made a mockery of the National Hockey League during the mid-1980s.

But Benny is ground zero. He is the father of professional hockey in Winnipeg as we know it. There would not be an NHL franchise in River City today if not for Hatskin, whose dreaming and scheming lured Hull away from the Chicago Blackhawks in 1972.

“I don’t think the NHL would have ever been in Winnipeg without the vision that Ben Hatskin and others had to bring the WHA to Winnipeg in ’72,” is how Chipman put it to Ted Wyman of the Winnipeg Sun in 2012. “The credit for the name that we still use today begins and ends there. And signing Hull completely legitimized the league and gave Winnipeg a chance to be the gold standard team within the league.”

Yup.

Why, then, is His Holy Hockeyness not saluting Hatskin?

According to the club website, “the new Winnipeg Jets Hall of Fame is being created to honour the impact and accomplishments of the team’s hockey legends and celebrate the rich history of professional hockey in Winnipeg.”

If it’s meant to be a players-only club, fine. Then say so. Otherwise, in any celebration of “the rich history of professional hockey in Winnipeg,” you must start with Ben Hatskin.

Chipman knows this. He has acknowledged this. So, why the reluctance, or flat-out refusal, to deliver Benny his due, other than spew a few kind words on the occasion of the original Jets’ 40th anniversary? Does Chipman harbor an anti-Ben bias? Is ego at play here? That is, does the grand poobah of True North Sports & Entertainment fear that a tangible tribute to Hatskin will shake some of the glitter from his own hockey halo?

Chipman, more so than his deep-pocketed co-bankroll, David Thomson, has heard the hosannas ring out loud and long, from far and wide, for his role in the resurrection of NHL shinny in River City. The bravo chorus has been deserved.

But this isn’t a chicken or egg thing. We know who and what came first. Ben Hatskin and the World Hockey Association. Then Bobby Hull. The rest is, as they say, history.

Do the right thing, Mark Chipman.

The Shoe led the lads on three victory laps as captain of the Winnipeg Jets in the World Hockey Association.

It’s a slight and a horrible omission that the late Lars-Erik Sjoberg isn’t going into the Hall of Fame in lockstep with Hedberg, Hull and Nilsson. The three Hot Liners gathered most of the glory in the WHA days due to their offensive exploits, but the man who made it all happen, and made it look so easy, from the back end was The Shoe. They didn’t stitch the ‘C’ on the Little General’s sweater by accident. Sjoberg also one-upped the three members of the fabled Hot Line—he won the Avco World Trophy three times compared to their two. He didn’t bail on the Jets, either. While Hedberg and Nilsson swanned off to Gotham and the Rangers, and Hull refused to play for John Ferguson, Sjoberg captained the Jets to their final WHA title and in their inaugural NHL season before retiring. The Shoe is a fit for the Hall.

In the case of Bobby Hull being inducted into the Hall of Fame, the Jets are following the lead of the Chicago Blackhawks by separating the hockey player from the guy away from the rink. There can be no quarrel over Hull’s worthiness as a shinny star and his contribution to the WHA. He’s an icon. Like all of us, though, Hull is a flawed human being. Among his flaws is the most distasteful bit of business that is the physical abuse of women. It was among the reasons a judge granted one of his ex-wives, Joanne, a divorce. But a known history of spousal abuse didn’t prevent the Blackhawks from a) erecting a statue of Hull outside the United Center, and b) hiring him as an official ambassador of the NHL club. Now the Jets are looking past Hull’s trespasses. My guess is that most in Jets Nation will do the same. I can’t. I don’t think men who beat women should be deified.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 45 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Once we get past the handwringing, the gnashing of the teeth and the anger/bitterness of journos across the land in the aftermath this week’s Postmedia print purge, what are readers of newspapers left with? This: Winnipeg is the sole two-paper town west of the Republic of Tranna.

Oh, sure, Postmedia continues to print both a broadsheet and a tabloid in Vancouver (Sun and Province), Edmonton (Sun and Journal) and Calgary (Sun and Herald), but this is a classic case of a one being dressed up as a two. If the deep-thinkers in one newsroom determine what is to occupy the space between the display ads of both dailies in those three bergs, it is one newspaper, no matter how it is packaged.

Think of this as beer. If you pour half a bottle of Molson Canadian into a mug and the other half into a tall, thin glass, you’re still drinking the same beer. Tastes the same, just looks different.

So it shall be in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. Rather than two competing journalists chasing the same story and, hopefully, delivering different slants, you now shall have one reporter with no urgency to get the scoop and no fear of being beaten by the opposition. There is no opposition. No alternative voice.

Which makes Pegtown a unique market in the western flank of the nation.

The puppeteers at Postmedia pull the strings for the Winnipeg Sun, while FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership bows to its own master in publishing the Winnipeg Free Press. Unlike others in the Postmedia collective, the two Pegtown sheets are not Siamese twins, joined at the head. They are in competition, which serves the greater need, even though the end result each day might not always satiate the appetite of readers.

What I am left to wonder is how much Winnipeg will remain in the Sun.

Although not included in this week’s carnage, which involved the merging of newsrooms at eight dailies (the Ottawa Sun and Citizen being the others) and the kicking to the curb of 90 journalists, the after shocks were felt in River City.

Out as sports editor of the Sun is Ted Wyman. Some invisible head sitting behind some invisible desk in some remote outpost of the land now will decide what Winnipeg sports fans want to read. How this serves Pegtown provides serious pause for ponder. I mean, shouldn’t a sports editor be able to reach out and feel the pulse of the people? It’s easy enough to recognize that the Winnipeg Jets and Winnipeg Blue Bombers are the big dogs in town and, thus, generate the most talk. But what of lesser players such as the Manitoba Moose, the Winnipeg Goldeyes, the University of Manitoba Bisons, junior hockey, local tennis, golf, curling, figure skating, etc.?

My concern is that they shall be lost in the shuffle.

Take curling as an e.g. It is the third biggest beat at the two River City dailies, behind only the Jets and Bombers. But will there be a Winnipeg Sun presence at next month’s Scotties Tournament of Hearts in Grande Prairie, Alta.? Not likely. Thus, no local angle, even though there shall be two Toba teams in the event. The Brier, meanwhile, is in Ottawa. Will we be reading Manitoba-centric dispatches from Paul Friesen, Ken Wiebe or the aforementioned Wyman, or generic puff from a Bytown scribe?

I fear the worst, and all this because Postmedia bit off more than it could chew when it purchased Sun Media’s English-language properties last spring.

As mentioned, Wyman is not out of work. He becomes part of the Sun’s bare-bones stable of scribes, replacing Kirk Penton, an elite reporter who has been anointed the Postmedia chain’s national writer for all things Canadian Football League. Coverage of the Bombers shouldn’t suffer in terms of quantity, but quality will take a hit because Penton is the best in the business.

After scribbling a piece about George (Shakey) Johnson the other day, it occurred to me that most folks don’t know the story behind the deposed Calgary Herald sports columnist’s nickname. We don’t call him Shakey because he’s a nervous Nellie with constant jitters. It’s due to his golf game. Back in the 1970s, you see, a few of us from the Winnipeg Tribune sports department would gather for a round of golf on occasion. The cast would rotate, but it generally involved Caveman Dutton, Greaser Drinnan, Swampdog Rauw, Davey Boy Komosky, Shakey and myself. Shakey played a neat-and-tidy game of golf. He struck the ball straight and true, although not far, and we actually witnessed a hole-in-one from him one day at Tuxedo. But he could not sink a putt inside three feet to save his life. He had the yips on the green. After one astonishing display of unparalleled hopelessness with the blade, we retreated to the pub, whereby Caveman Dutton and I commenced to calling him Shakey. The name stuck.

Big night for my longtime friend and colleague Dave Komosky, who joins the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Media Roll of Honour at their 60th annual awards dinner at the Delta Hotel. As I scribbled a few weeks ago, it’s a long overdue honor. I only wish I could be there to hear his acceptance speech. I have a feeling Davey Boy is going to put some people on the BBQ.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 45 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.She is most proud of her Q Award, presented to her in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.